Steve Hall

I'm the technical lead/manager of a small group of scientist, engineers and analysts at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center who focus on 'system of system' modeling and simulation in support of effectiveness analysis. Our goal is to provide advice on what systems the U.S. Government ought to procure in order to provide the best 'bang for the buck'. In recent years networking advances have started to have a profound influence on how the behavior of these elements are coordinated ... and on what we want and can reasonably expect of their collective/emergent behavior. I'm looking to better understand the role of complexity theory in designing and controlling these next generation architectures.

Halloween 2006

Dan's questions:

1. What are your main interests? Feel free to include a "pie in the sky" big idea!

My fundamental interests revolve around how to 'engineer' such systems so that their emergent behaviors produce the desired effects ... an objective made more challenging as traditional military objectives become intertwined with traditional diplomatic objectives.

I'm interested in understanding the 'proper' role of the human that's ultimately responsible for the swarm's emergent behavior.

I'm interested in understanding the critical elements of swarms whose fundamental environment is defined by other (potentially hostile) swarms. E.g. how the swarm recognizes emergent behavior (its own and others) and respond intelligently to it.

I'm interested in understanding how and when swarms organize, disorganize and/or determine the 'optimal' level of organization. Does the nature of the external swarm(s) determine the optimal level of self organization and/or cohesiveness of response?

I'm interested in understanding how shared narratives (or memes) come into existence and how they (should?) influence what individual agents do. Does Post Structuralist